A continuous market is not just a longer session. Several things traders rely on are artefacts of the market closing, and they disappear entirely.
Annualising volatility
Equity volatility conventions use trading days — roughly two hundred and fifty a year — because the market is shut the rest of the time. Crypto trades every day, so the convention uses three hundred and sixty-five. Apply the wrong one and you are out by around twenty per cent on every volatility figure you compute.
This is a common error and it propagates silently into anything downstream.
The overnight gap is gone
A large part of equity risk management is about the hours you cannot trade. Gap risk, overnight holds, the decision to flatten into the close — none of it applies. The move that would have been a gap happens in front of you at four in the morning, continuously, and you can trade it if you are awake.
That is better in principle and harder in practice, because the risk did not go away; it relocated into hours when you are not watching.
There is no reference price
Daily open, daily close, prior settlement — all conventions rather than events. Different venues use different cut-offs, so a daily candle depends on whose day you are using. Any strategy referencing the previous close needs to specify whose.
Liquidity still has a schedule
The market is open but not uniformly active. Depth thins substantially during certain hours and around weekends, and moves during those windows go further on less size. The session disappeared; the liquidity cycle did not.
Trading the quiet hours means accepting worse fills and faster moves, which is a real cost even though nothing formally closed.